Democracy Now! Blog

New details are emerging that indicate the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan is far worse than previously known, with three of the four affected reactors experiencing full meltdowns. Meanwhile, in the U.S., massive flooding along the Missouri River has put Nebraska’s two nuclear plants, both near Omaha, on alert.

Under Mubarak, state-owned media was a propaganda arm of the government, parroting party dogma while dismissing public criticism and political opposition. After his ouster, the struggle for press freedom is far from over. Democracy Now!’s Sharif Abdel-Kouddous reports from Cairo for The Nation magazine.

Tonight’s debate between Republican presidential candidates marks the first national debate appearance of Mitt Romney, former MA governor. Meanwhile, fellow Mormon and former Utah governor, Jon Huntsman, has yet to announce and will skip the debate. Democracy Now! spoke with former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson about the political record of Hunstman and Romney. The two became "great friends" when they worked together on the 2002 Winter Olympics in New York City. [includes rush transcript]

The media has been awash with New York Congressmember Anthony Weiner’s string of electronic sexual peccadillos. Punctuating the sensationalism, and between the TV commercials from the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries, are story after story of extreme weather events. Herein lies the real scandal: Why aren’t the TV meteorologists, with each story, following the words “extreme weather” with another two, “climate change”? We need modern-day eco-Paul (or Paula) Revere to rouse the populace to this imminent threat.

Former Black Panther Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt died in Tanzania on June 2. He was imprisoned for 27 years, until his case was overturned in 1997. Hear Democracy Now!’s Oct. 5, 2000 interview: http://ow.ly/594MV

Tune in Friday for an extensive interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh about his new article "Iran and the Bomb," published in The New Yorker. Hersh writes: "There is a large body of evidence including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the United States could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago–allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimations of the state’s military capacities and intentions."

While most in the United States were recognizing Memorial Day with a three-day weekend, the people of Honduras were engaged in a historic event: the return of President Manuel Zelaya, 23 months after he was forced into exile at gunpoint in the first coup in Central America in a quarter-century.

Vermont is a land of proud firsts. This small New England state was the first to join the 13 Colonies. Its constitution was the first to ban slavery. It was the first to establish the right to free education for all—public education. This week, Vermont will boast another first: the first state in the nation to offer single-payer health care.

Eight years to the day after then-President George W. Bush strode onto the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln under a banner announcing “Mission Accomplished,” President Barack Obama, without flight suit or swagger, made the surprise announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a U.S. military operation.

As the New Democratic Party comes in second in Canada’s election, we revisit Amy Goodman’s 2009 column on the late Tommy Douglas, the NDP’s first leader and the pioneering politician credited with creating the modern Canadian health care system. Douglas was Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather.

More than 10,000 people converged in Washington, DC, this past week to discuss, organize, mobilize and protest around the issue of climate change. While tax day Tea Party gatherings of a few hundred scattered around the country made the news, this massive gathering, Power Shift 2011, was largely ignored by the media.

Security officers at BP’s shareholder meeting today in London blocked the entrance of a delegation of fishermen and women from the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast area heavily damaged by last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Among them was Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf Coast. She described the scene to Democracy Now! [includes rush transcript]

One month into the pro-democracy uprising in the small Gulf state of Bahrain — where the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet is based, tasked with protecting “U.S. interests” — Bahrainis are suffering the same violent repression as Libyans. So why does Obama have nothing to say?

Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous was a guest Monday on Inside Story when the Al Jazeera English program reported that the Egyptian public prosecutor has issued an order to summon Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, and his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, for questioning over allegations of corruption.

On the same day President Barack Obama formally launched his re-election campaign, his attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that key suspects in the 9/11 attacks would be tried not in federal court, but through controversial military commissions at Guantanamo. Nevertheless, one Guantanamo case will be tried in New York.

DN! In Depth

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan — The corporate television newscasts spend more and more time covering the increasingly disruptive, costly and at times deadly weather. But they consistently fail to make the link between extreme weather and climate change.